Characterizing the Evolution of Communities on Reddit

One of the most important structures in social networks is communities. Communities in social networks evolve over time. Understanding the evolution of communities is useful in many applications, such as building successful communities, maintaining the success of communities, etc. There have been some works on studying online communities such as understanding the life cycle of users and understanding the loyalty of members in a community. An aspect of online community studies that has not been sufficiently studied is the evolution of communities over time. In this work, we investigate factors that significantly differentiate the different parts of the evolution of communities. Firstly, we identify the different patterns that can exist in the evolution of communities. Next, we examine how different features differentiate parts of the patterns identified. Experimental results showed that the linguistic style of users who make posts and the interaction dynamics of members in a community are related to different parts of communities’ evolution with respect to the number of active users.

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